Wish to keep on high of the science and politics driving biotech in the present day? Enroll to get our biotech e-newsletter in your inbox.

Good morning. It’s been a difficult time for employees within the biopharma trade. We’ve seen corporations announce layoffs one after one other, and other people on-line speak about the way it appears more and more tough to safe a brand new job. Learn our newest on this topic under, with new numbers on the state of the job market.

The necessity-to-know this morning

• Flagship Pioneering raised a new $2.6 billion investment fund, plus an extra $1 billion for sector-specific facet funds. This brings the entire capital raised by Flagship into its funds since 2021 to $6.4 billion.
• Abbvie named a new R&D chief. Roopal Thakkar takes over as chief scientific officer and govt vp for R&D, changing the retiring Thomas Hudson. Thakkar is presently Abbvie’s chief medical officer.

Laid-off biopharma employees vie for scarce openings

Layoffs have persevered within the biopharma trade for a number of years now, and employees appear to have fewer and fewer prospects. As a sign of how tough the job market is, there have been extra job cuts at giant pharma corporations this yr than at small biotechs.

About 67% of employees laid off through the first half this yr have been at giant pharma corporations, in accordance with information from the commerce group BIO. That’s a pointy soar from 2021 to 2023, when bigger corporations accounted for 47% of layoffs.

Many of those cuts have been introduced as a part of broader reorganizations by corporations with top-selling merchandise coming off patent. One worker who was laid off from Bristol Myers Squibb has utilized to 60 openings to this point to no avail. One other employee who was laid off from BMS determined to depart the biopharma trade altogether and accepted a job at Amazon.

Learn extra from STAT’s Jonathan Wosen.

uniQure shares soar on Huntington’s information

uniQure was the best-performing biopharma inventory yesterday, with shares leaping 76% after the corporate reported optimistic information on its experimental gene remedy for Huntington’s illness.

Up to date interim information from a Part 1/2 trial confirmed that at two years, 9 sufferers who obtained the excessive dose of the drug had a 0.2 level lower on a measure of illness development referred to as cUHDRS. That compares with a 1 level lower in an exterior management group based mostly on pure historical past research. These information counsel there was an 80% slowing of illness development within the handled sufferers.

Analysts mentioned the way forward for this drug, although, will rely largely on how uniQure’s discussions with regulators go, notably whether or not it is going to be okay to make use of a pure historical past management group. The corporate is slated to satisfy with the FDA within the second half of this yr to debate the potential of accelerated approval.

Why Amylyx is betting on a GLP-1 antagonist

After pulling its ALS drug from the market following a failed trial, Amylyx has now acquired a GLP-1 receptor antagonist from Eiger BioPharmaceuticals. The corporate plans to start out a Part 3 program subsequent yr to check the drug in a situation referred to as post-bariatric hypoglycemia, it mentioned in a press launch in the present day. I chatted briefly with co-CEOs Justin Klee and Joshua Cohen about this determination.

First, to be clear, this drug isn’t in the identical class because the extremely well-liked diabetes and weight problems medicine — these are GLP-1 receptor agonists. The drug that Amylyx has acquired, referred to as avexitide, blocks GLP-1 receptors and has been examined in uncommon settings: post-bariatric hypoglycemia and congenital hyperinsulinism. In each circumstances, sufferers’s insulin ranges are too excessive and so they expertise dangerously low blood sugar. The CEOs mentioned these sufferers even have elevated ranges of the GLP-1 hormone (which promotes insulin secretion), and avexitide is designed to assist sufferers return to regular physiologic GLP-1 ranges.

I requested Klee and Cohen why they opted for this drug, given Amylyx’s historic deal with neurodegenerative illnesses. The CEOs famous that they’ve lengthy studied a candidate in Wolfram syndrome, a uncommon genetic dysfunction that causes childhood-onset diabetes, and the brand new drug expands on their work in endocrinology. So now, they see the 2 main areas of focus for the corporate as neuro and endocrine circumstances, they mentioned.

In growing endocrine medicine, there are established outcomes to measure in trials, comparable to glucose and insulin ranges, whereas for neurodegenerative circumstances, there’s nonetheless ongoing analysis on higher biomarkers to measure illness, Cohen mentioned.

Pfizer’s chief scientific officer to step down

After serving as Pfizer’s chief scientific officer for 15 years, by means of the tenures of three CEOs, Mikael Dolsten can be stepping down as soon as he helps discover his substitute.

My colleague Matt Herper seemed again on the ups and downs of Dolsten’s tenure. A key spotlight was Pfizer’s efficiency through the Covid-19 pandemic, when the corporate and its companion BioNTech beat Moderna to be the primary to carry a Covid vaccine to market.

However extra lately, Pfizer has didn’t ship on traders’ expectations, with the corporate’s shares now buying and selling at about half the place they have been throughout their pandemic peak.

Learn extra.

FTC goes after PBMs in new report

The FTC launched a prolonged report yesterday that mentioned pharmacy profit managers wield “monumental energy” that may have an effect on which medicine can be found, at what worth, and which pharmacies sufferers can use to get medicines.

The three largest PBMs — Caremark Rx, Specific Scripts, and OptumRx —processed almost 80% of the roughly 6.6 billion prescriptions distributed by U.S. pharmacies in 2023, the FTC mentioned.

Moreover, PBMs, which at the moment are a part of large conglomerates that additionally consist of massive insurers and pharmacy chains, impose unfair and dangerous contractual phrases on unbiased pharmacies that may put them out of enterprise, in accordance with the report.

Learn extra from STAT’s Ed Silverman.

Extra reads

• Zevra to face FDA adcomm in August over beforehand rejected uncommon illness drug, Endpoints
• SciRhom pulls in $70M for a brand new sort of immune illness drug, BioPharma Dive
• Free medical college tuition unlikely to have a serious affect on the U.S. well being care system, STAT
• Pay attention: Anthony Fauci on presidents, chicken flu, and turning down a multimillion-dollar job, STAT